Discourses in action: Operations of race, sexuality and gender in talk-in-interaction

This seminar relays the analysis and findings from my PhD thesis, which is a conversation analytic and poststructuralist study of discourses and social categories. The thesis analyses how discursive categories of race, sexuality and gender operate in talk among lesbian Chinese women, and how the categories produced by these discourses are implemented in, and potentially reshaped by, interaction.

To do this, I propose a critical conversation analysis methodology. In this seminar, I will present conversational fragments where participants orient to and navigate these three discourses, and make the case that conversation is a key site where social categories operate, but also a key site where they, and the discourses which produce them, may be resisted. The data comes from a corpus of approximately 16 hours of audio recordings of Mandarin conversations between and with lesbian Chinese women who live in Melbourne.

Friday 7 August, 3:15pm

https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/99579340209?pwd=Rnl2bmZ3TVdlKysyT1djeW5ua0cvdz09

Password: 642121